The Lily in the Snow

by Jackie French

  Miss Lily did not appear in Burke’s Peerage or Debrett’s. Which meant, thought Hannelore, that she was probably illegitimate, as she had long assumed. But the relationship must still be a close one. One did not give a relative the freedom of one’s home and estate for three or more months each year without both trust and liking. Surely Nigel must know where Miss Lily was now. And if she had been killed in the war, or now lived permanently abroad, why not say so?

  Mist rose from the ice-tipped fields. By the time they reached London’s outskirts the white fog had turned yellow, its threads had become cat’s tails and finally the classic pea souper, though Hannelore had never known a pea the colour of dirty soap. English humour, calling something so yellow after something green?

  The house Dolphie had rented for himself and his niece was several streets from the embassy. The fog was even thicker there, the street jammed with carts and carriages as well as cars. It would be quicker to walk. She knocked on the window between the back seat and the driver, instructed him to park when he could, then slipped out the door and onto the footpath.

  The fog was no clearer on the footpath, but at least it was easier to make one’s way next to the shop windows, nor, in this haven of Mayfair, was there risk of being accosted by unwanted attentions. A breath of warm and toasted teacake emerged from a Worthy’s Teahouse and then she heard the high, pure song of a girl.

  It was a Flemish lullaby. One of the maids at her uncle’s had sung it sometimes, to amuse the children at nursery tea. Hannelore smiled at the memory, then looked at the almost empty hat lying on the footpath in front of the girl. Such a young girl, in such a thin dress, so cold, so hungry.

  For two years, in the war, she had been hungry. For months after she had starved.

  But she had no money to give this girl. A prinzessin did not carry money. But she smiled at the girl and received a blue-eyed smile in return.

  She would send Albert the footman with money for the girl, five shillings perhaps. But Hannelore also knew too well what might happen to money given to a young girl — a father waiting nearby who would take it for beer with a gin chaser at the nearest pub, perhaps, or a pimp who would not just take the money but blacken her eye if there wasn’t enough.

  No, far better to instruct Albert to take the poor child into Worthy’s, to buy her cocoa and corned-beef sandwiches — possibly made with beef corned from Sophie’s far-off Australian cattle. No one could steal a meal the child had already eaten.

  My act of compassion for today, she thought. Miss Lily had advised that everyone needed to commit one act of individual compassion each day, to inhibit self-obsession. Love for humanity or one’s country was not enough. The hand and heart must help another person personally, or at least via Albert.

  Yes, Miss Lily would approve. Miss Lily, who had the network that the Führer so badly needed if the party was to make any major impression now that conditions had improved under the Weimar Republic. Miss Lily, who was so very similar to Nigel . . .

  Chapter 5

  Love is indeed the most satisfying meal of all, my dears. But never think it will satisfy you as dessert or entrée too.

  Miss Lily, 1913

  SOPHIE

  Sophie helped Nanny and Alice, the nursing maid, feed Danny and Rose their suppers. Danny spooned up his bread and milk and then his stewed apple neatly and politely, as if already aware it was his duty as the next earl to take his nourishment.

  ‘Gleek!’ announced Rose, spitting apple and custard onto the window.

  Nanny glanced at Sophie, wondering which of them should administer discipline and obviously hoping it would be Sophie. It was already apparent that the toddler’s strength of will was only matched by her mother’s.

  ‘No,’ said Sophie calmly to her daughter.

  Rose reached out a sticky finger and ran it down the glass, making a pattern in the mess. Sophie wiped it up with a napkin, then met her daughter’s eyes as Rose held up another spoonful. ‘No,’ Sophie said again.

  ‘Glarrark!’

  ‘No.’

  Rose drooped, looking reproachfully through her eyelashes at Sophie. Sophie laughed. ‘It is still no.’

  Rose sighed and ate her spoonful of stewed apple.

  ‘See?’ said Sophie. ‘No spanking necessary.’

  ‘Only for you, your ladyship,’ said Nanny.

  ‘Children want to please adults.’ That had been one of Miss Lily’s maxims. ‘You just need to show them firmly how to do it.’

  Nanny set her lips, so obviously not saying, ‘That is easy for you to say, your ladyship.’

  Sophie pressed a kiss onto Rose’s curls and Danny’s straight dark hair. Her bath would be ready, perfumed with French salts. Green would have laid out her dinner dress. The fire would crackle with apple wood; the man she loved, who loved her, waited in the library with her two close friends, while her children would sleep, safe and beautiful, in this nursery. Life was blissful.

  If only it was not predictable as well.

  The four of them ate informally in the library most nights, the dishes placed under covers on the sideboard by Hereward the butler. A lady’s maid like Green could not eat in the dining room, but a meal in the library with the earl and countess was . . . possible. Especially where servants in this house always came from the estate, as their parents had before them, and even more so now that so much unemployment meant fewer jobs beyond the estate. The Shillings servants would tolerate behaviour that their peers in other great houses would most firmly object to in the strict class order of the servants’ hall.

  Cars and telephones might now link Shillings more closely to the world, but it was still a world where the master protected the tenants and the tenants were loyal. Shillings had been rich in secrets for the past thirty years — many far more scandalous than a maid dining with her employers.

  Nigel helped himself to hare, casseroled in cider with carrots and parsnips. ‘What did Hannelore want?’

  ‘Miss Lily,’ said Sophie shortly.

  The fire snickered in the silence. Each in that room longed for Miss Lily too. Each also knew that, except for the briefest of appearances, Miss Lily had gone. Sometimes Sophie wondered which of them missed her more. ‘And James?’ Sophie added.

  It had been interesting that James had wanted to speak to Nigel, not her. While Nigel had worked with James — or possibly for him, as an agent of the Crown — it had been Sophie who James had approached two years earlier to gather intelligence about the Bolshevik tendencies among the aristocracy.

  ‘Nothing political. He wants me to help identify a hospitalised man whom I met briefly when he was a staff officer,’ said Nigel slowly. ‘He’d hoped I’d known him better than I had, but I think we only met three or four times, and only one of those informally. An Australian, as a matter of fact, acting as liaison with the French. A Major John McDonald.’

  Sophie flinched. But John was the most common name in the English-speaking world. There was no reason to think there was any connection with the man she had left behind. The ‘John’ she had known in his hut by the Thuringa gate claimed he had assumed the name of his dead twin brother. But James had found no record of a lost twin named John, nor even any enlisted twins with other names who might fit the story she’d been given back in those days of gold and sensuality in Australia. It had been a fiction, or possibly a hallucination of a man traumatised by deep war damage. Sophie had even met two other men in her hospitals who claimed to be their own brothers — and those other ‘brothers’ of the men who had seen what they could not bear to have witnessed.

  ‘He wants you to go to Australia? Surely there’s someone there who can identify him,’ said Jones.

  Nigel shook his head. ‘The man in question is in a hospital outside Paris.’

  ‘Why still in France?’ asked Sophie.

  ‘Possibly because no one knew who he might be so no country has claimed him. Or he may simply have been overlooked. It happens.’

  ‘Another lost memory case
?’ asked Green. It was not uncommon, due to widespread shock and head wounds. Men posted as missing or even killed during the war did still occasionally turn up even now — as did those who had deliberately assumed the identity of a dead comrade to evade wives, debts or police, or occasionally to gain an inheritance.

  ‘Possibly. The poor chap had a bad dose of mustard gas, as well as other wounds. He can neither speak nor make out anything except the vaguest of shapes, and his face is too scarred to be able to see what he looked like before his injuries. The scars on his hands have grafted them together so he cannot write. He can walk, but not for long periods, I gather. John McDonald was declared dead, but no body was recovered. His wife, or widow, employed an investigation firm after the war, to try to find out what had happened to her husband.

  ‘It seems no one witnessed Major McDonald’s death or, at least,’ Nigel amended, ‘no one who survived. The agency has also been checking hospitals, of course. Finally they found a man of roughly the right age and height.’

  ‘Surely they could have found him before this!’ said Green angrily.

  ‘They probably focused on returned servicemen in Australia and in England, as well as hospital records here in Britain — this is where most of the patients with major injuries were sent initially. But for some reason this man stayed in a hospital in France, and there are enough similarities for Mrs McDonald to travel there to see him. James says she is sure the man the agency located is her husband. But although he can hear, he has made no sign of recognition.’

  ‘Memory loss, I suppose, or truly bad shell shock, if indeed he really is her husband. Poor woman. And poor man,’ said Sophie. ‘The most obvious reason for him to still be in France is that he IS French.’

  ‘But one who understands fluent English,’ said Nigel. ‘That’s what alerted the investigator. But now he won’t respond at all to any questions.’

  ‘A man of integrity,’ said Jones. ‘If Mrs McDonald is mistaken it would be better for whomever he is to let her think he is her husband, and be cared for by her in a home and not a hospital. I presume she is well-off, to have come all this way?’

  ‘The family seems comfortable.’

  ‘Would you recognise him?’ asked Sophie.

  ‘I doubt it. Not after twelve years, even without his injuries,’ said Nigel. ‘But the officers he served with are of course back in Australia.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s possible that if this is McDonald, he might recognise me and make some sign. That’s what James hopes.’

  ‘I remember McDonald, I think, though I saw him only once,’ said Jones. ‘Big fellow, if he’s the one I’m thinking of. Good at rugby. Remember that match outside Pozières? He scored the winning try.’

  ‘I doubt he plays rugby now,’ said Sophie. ‘No useful birthmarks?’

  ‘If there were, the question of identity would presumably have been solved.’ Nigel glanced at Jones, who nodded. ‘We’ll go, of course. A vain hope at best, but one can’t ignore this kind of thing.’

  His unspoken words whispered though the library: there is no essential work, either political or on the estate, that I am needed for here.

  ‘May I go with you?’ asked Sophie. Suddenly Shillings’ neat damp fields and soggy forests had closed in on her.

  ‘We could all go. Paris! Hats!’ said Green dreamily. ‘And Coco Chanel has some fascinating new designs. Evening trousers in the most divine velvet —’

  ‘I was thinking more of discussions with my Paris agent about the new line in canned baby food,’ said Sophie drily. Although technically Australia could only trade with Britain, Sophie had circumvented the restriction with a company based in England that employed agents across Europe and the United States.

  ‘I should have known,’ said Jones. ‘But won’t you miss the children?’

  ‘We can take them with us. And Nanny. I am sure the Ritz can cope with a pair of toddlers.’

  Jones blinked, but made no comment. Sophie realised that in the days when he, Nigel and Green travelled before the war, they probably moved swiftly, unencumbered by children, a nanny, and all the paraphernalia that went with them. Well, times had changed.

  Sophie glanced at Green. ‘Greenie and I might even be of some help to Mrs McDonald. No matter what the outcome, she will probably be glad of women to support her.’ Miss Lily had also taught her that a man would more easily confess weakness to a woman, not another man. Sophie might be able to convince the scarred man in the hospital bed to communicate when a man could not. But that possibility need not be spoken.

  Jones looked at Nigel, who nodded in his turn. ‘I’ll make the arrangements,’ said Jones. ‘As soon as possible, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes. The least we can do is give Mrs McDonald the feeling that she has not been abandoned in the search for her husband,’ said Nigel. He hesitated. ‘Did Hannelore say why it was so urgent that Miss Lily meet her German firebrand?’

  Sophie shook her head. ‘I assumed it was just for general support. But you’re right. She did imply it was urgent.’

  ‘Write to James,’ suggested Nigel. ‘He may know more.’ He smiled. ‘At the very least a German prinzessin’s urgency may be another piece in his jigsaw of the Empire.’

  Sophie pulled the bell for Hereward to take the plates away.

  Chapter 6

  A woman’s greatest power comes from the refusal of so many men to admit that she has any, much less long-term, plans and a strategy for achieving them. Strategy will nearly always win against the assumption that chance will solve life for you.

  Miss Lily, 1913

  HANNELORE

  Hannelore dipped the nib of her pen in the inkwell. Even Dolphie used a fountain pen now, but one could not write a truly individual hand with a mass-produced pen.

  My most dear Adolf,

  It was so good to hear that you are happy with your new home. The mountain air will refresh you, as you must need after such campaigning.

  She applied the blotting paper, then thought how to express herself before she continued.

  I have not yet had the success here that I wished for. I am still sure, however, that the British aristocracy must see that Russia is our true enemy and that only a Germany united under a strong leader can act as a bulwark against bolshevism . . .

  Dolphie’s official position was Cultural Attaché. His real job was to persuade their English royal relations to support Germany’s cause and lessen the burden of reparations. But the war was still too close. Germany continued to be seen as an enemy, not an ally against bolshevism and the growing strength of the Soviet Union, nor did her generation want to think of war, or even politics, just jazz and motorcars, dance clubs and cocktails.

  Or domesticity, like Sophie and Nigel. Hannelore put down her pen and walked to the window, gazing out at the yellow London fog, so thick one could almost slice it.

  She could not concentrate, not even on a letter to the Führer. The news this morning had been . . . disturbing. But surely it meant nothing.

  Albert had given a meal to the strange child singing outside the teahouse. But a few days later Albert had told Welsh, her maid, about the child’s strange claim. Welsh had mentioned the story to Hannelore, as she brushed Hannelore’s hair this morning, complaining about the new housemaid as she brushed.

  ‘That’s young people today, madam! Thinking they are too good for honest work. It’s like that girl you told Albert to take to the tearooms. Do you know what that little minx told him?’

  Hannelore shook her head slightly under the ministrations of the hairbrush.

  ‘She said she is really an English aristocrat! Whatever will these girls think of next?’

  Hannelore smiled. ‘A lost princess?’

  ‘The daughter of an earl’s sister. What was his name? Something to do with halfpennies. No, shillings, that was it. The Earl of Shillings.’

  Hannelore lifted her hand to halt the hair brushing. ‘The Earl of Shillings doesn’t have a sister.’ If Miss Lily was an illegitimate half-sister, thou
ght Hannelore, she had never been acknowledged.

  ‘Of course it is ridiculous,’ Welsh had said. ‘A street urchin could never be related to an earl. But Albert said the girl insisted. Her mother was Lily Shillings, and she was going to find her.’

  Hannelore’s first thought was triumph. She might use the girl’s claim — true or not — to make Nigel admit where Miss Lily was now. Then reality changed the dream. Miss Lily, of all people, would never abandon a daughter, even an illegitimate one.

  Yet Hannelore still thought about the claim all through her breakfast, the milk coffee and a fresh roll with butter, which was all she ate in the mornings, from a tray in her room. The claim was impossible, just as Welsh had said. And a sister of Nigel’s, legitimate or not, would be Lily Vaile, not Shillings. Unless of course Miss Lily was not entitled to either surname, but had assumed the name of Shillings. For after all, no surname had ever been mentioned in those magic months before the war.

  Miss Lily had been in her forties, at least, though with her grace and charm none of the girls had been able to agree about her age. Was she still young enough to have had a child during the war years?

  An illegitimate child of an illegitimate sister? Was that why Nigel and Sophie no longer received Miss Lily? But she could not think that of them. They were kind. Like Miss Lily, they would never abandon a child, or her mother. It was just the name that had caught her attention when she was so eager to find Miss Lily. A coincidence, no more.

  And yet.

  ‘I hope I’m not interrupting?’

  Hannelore came back to the present as Dolphie entered. He spoke English, as they almost always did in England. Their role there was to appear as innocuous as possible, and they wouldn’t be innocuous speaking German. He was immaculate in a white tie: Dolphie refused to adopt the new habit of dinner jackets, declaring it an American decadence. He dropped a kiss on Hannelore’s hair. ‘Who are you writing to?’